Academic literature on the topic 'Greek authors, [Latin authors, Syriac authors, etc.]'

Abstract The Physiologus is a patristic text containing allegorical interpretations of animals. This article examines the Greek, Latin, and Syriac reception history of the serpent material from the Physiologus and concludes that while Greek and Latin authors repeated serpent material from the Physiologus, John the Solitary and Isaac of Nineveh, in the Syriac tradition, furthered the allegorical sense of this text by adding an ascetical layer of interpretation. In particular, they both use the serpent material from the Physiologus to explain the transformation from the outer man to the inner man. Two additional conclusions are offered. First, this article shows that the Physiologus became a standard resource for a “redeem the snake” tradition that emerged sometime in the fourth and fifth centuries due to a renewed interest in classical zoology and due to an increase in biblical commentary on Matt 10:16, where Jesus encourages his followers to be as wise as serpents. Second, this article shows that some of the serpent analogies from the Physiologus circulated independently from the rest in a no-longer-extant form of the Physiologus or else as part of a separate work, possibly another natural history compendium. This conclusion has repercussions for dating the Physiologus.

This article describes The Gateway to the Syriac Saints, a database project developed by the Syriac Reference Portal (www.syriaca.org). It is a research tool for the study of Syriac saints and hagiographic texts. The Gateway to the Syriac Saints is a two-volume database: 1) Qadishe and 2) Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica (BHSE). Hagiography, the lives of the saints, is a multiform genre. It contains elements of myth, history, biblical exegesis, romance, and theology. The production of saints’ lives blossomed in late antiquity alongside the growth of the cult of the saints. Scholars have attended to hagiographic traditions in Greek and Latin, but many scholars have yet to discover the richness of Syriac hagiographic literature: the stories, homilies, and hymns on the saints that Christians of the Middle East told and preserved. It is our hope that our database will give scholars and students increased access to these traditions to generate new scholarship. The first volume, Qadishe or “saints” in Syriac, is a digital catalogue of saints or holy persons venerated in the Syriac tradition. Some saints are native to the Syriac-speaking milieu, whereas others come from other linguistic or cultural traditions. Through the translation of their hagiographies and the diffusion of saints’ cults in the late antique world, saints were adopted, “imported,” and appropriated into Syriac religious memory. The second volume, the BHSE, focuses on Syriac hagiographic texts. The BHSE contains the titles of over 1000 Syriac stories, hymns, and homilies on saints. It also includes authors’ or hagiographers’ names, the first and last lines of the texts (in Syriac, English, and French), bibliographic information, and the names of the manuscripts containing these hagiographic works. We have also listed modern and ancient translations of these works. All of the data in the Gateway to the Syriac Saints has been encoded in TEI, and it is fully searchable, linkable, and open.

The work “On Education” (De tradendis disciplinis) by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540) is considered from the perspective of the use of ancient literature during the in-itial period of child school training (from 7 to 15 years). Vives’ appreciation of the Latin language, a positive attitude towards teaching Greek at school, and the influence of ancient languages on modern European languages — Italian, Spanish, and French are discussed. The article draws attention to some features in teaching the Latin language that are not characteristic of the hu-manists who preceded Vives and also wrote about school. They are as follows: using the native language as an instrument for mastering Latin at the initial stage of learning, and using modern literature - writers, grammarians, humanists, which helps to learn ancient languages in the subsequent period. These features can be explained by Vives’ epoch when national states were being estab-lished, national languages were strengthening, and pedagogical thinking was developing. The article also examines the issue brought up by Vives himself about the attitude to pagan literature and to some, in Vives’ opinion, morally questionable poets. With all the inconsistency of Vives and the low persuasiveness of his self-censorship, the solution to this problem comes down to se-lecting such authors the study of whose works will protect school students from vices. The article shows that both Latin and Greek literature (works on oratory, poetry, comedy, history, my-thology, etc.) are widely used in teaching. Ancient writings not only form and enrich the language, but also provide versatile knowledge, mainly of humanitarian kind, help to bring up an ed-ucated and cultured person. This is supported by a large survey of over 100 ancient authors, modern writers, scientists, humanists, early medieval writers, “church fathers”, publishers, translators, and commentators provided at the very end of Vives' discussion on education, with brief characteristics of many of them.

AbstractThe proposal I make for the restoration of fr. 22 Powell of the Erigone by Eratosthenes faithfully rewrites the manuscript tradition and does not conflict with the metre, as the line Ἰκαριοῖ, etc. (see fr. 4 R.) is balanced, thanks to the trihemimeral caesura and the bucolic diaeresis. To further my argument, I cite a series of hexameters from both earlier epic as well as that of the Hellenistic era, where the secondary caesurae (trihemimeral + hephthemimeral or bucolic) are either found alone or are reinforced, as the main caesura is absent or cannot be applied given the enclitic, preposition, and (sometimes) elision. Starting from the surviving line, I argue that in the Erigone mention was certainly made of the origins of tragedy, which are located in Attica. Eratosthenes drew from a pre-existing theory and, through his authority, made it the prevailing one. This can be seen from a plethora of similar evidence, in both later Greek and Latin authors and scholars.

The problem with the origin of the name of Tuman Monastery near Golubac has so far been addressed by several authors who have proposed several different solutions. This paper is an attempt to point out other aspects that should be examined using the available historical and linguistic material, which the previous researchers did not take into account. There were interpretations and etymological explanations proposed earlier, the assumptions about the name of the monastery based on the words from the ancient Greek or Latin and according to the same name of one Armenian monastery etc. Paying due respect to the preserved traditions of the foundation and the name of this monastery, we believe that in the discussion of its name it was necessary to refer to the possible Slavic origin of the name - especially in the light of the numerous existing parallels in the toponyms of the regions inhabited mainly by the Slavic people, as well as its Pre-Indo-European, or perhaps Asiatic, i.e. Mongolian-Tatar background. It is not known when the Tuman monastery got its present name. The first mention of the monastery in the village of Tuman near Golubac dates from the second half of the 16th century. A few Serbian authors claim that in Armenia there was/is a monastery of the same name, according to which the monastery of Tuman near Golubac was named. However, the existence of this monastery is not certain. It remains to be examined whether the toponym of St. Tuman, recorded in the areas of today?s Turkey which had been inhabited by the Arme?nians until the beginning of the 20th century, has any connection with the name of Tuman monastery near Golubac.

The aim of the study is to analyze the stages of putting into the scientific circulation and the functioning of accentological terminology in the Ukrainian linguistic area. The sources of the study are the ancient Ukrainian grammars and theoretical works about accent. The article focuses on how researchers perceived and understood such a complex phenomenon as an accent since the XVI century, because the development of the terminology base also depends on this; on which terms the phenomena of the words accentuation in the ancient Ukrainian grammars are marked and their further functioning in the Ukrainian linguistic area is analyzed. This period of time is chosen, because the accent in the ancient Ukrainian written monuments is used from the XVI century. It is noted that in each period of linguistics development the accentology was interpreted differently by researchers: as a separate part of grammar; as a separate part of linguistics; as a part of phonetics; as a supersegment unit; as a component of morphology. In grammar works of middle XX – beginning XXI centuries verbal accent is analyzed in phonetic and morphological aspects; attention is paid to the interdependence of accent and phonetic processes with morphological peculiarities of word changing. As the above-mentioned material shows, the researchers of the Ukrainian system considered the accent as an important phenomenon in the language structure. In addition to the time-quantitative characteristics and expiration that influence the quality of the vowels and consonants in the stressed and unstressed words, the researchers drew attention to the movement of the verbal accent, freedom, non-attachment to the syllable and morphemes. Also they stressed on the importance of accent in those languages where it is movable, since the same word, but differently emphasized, can acquire completely different meanings. It is also noted that the accent was not analyzed in all grammar works. It is identified that the theory about accent researchers called in different ways: Prosody, Prypalo, Stress, Prypetie, Accent, Accentology. The origin, the functioning of these terms and the putting of new terms (in particular, prosodeme, accent, accentuation, etc.) into the scientific space, the outlining of accent issues are studied. The analyzed material shows that accentological terminology was based on the Greek-Latin basis: the authors of the ancient grammars of the end XVI−XVII centuries used the terms of classical languages grammars, that “were perceived as an example of development and orderliness”. The originality of this or that scientist, according to V.V. Nimchuk, was manifested primarily in the way how he was able to research or describe the Slavic system in terms of his epoch. Historical circumstances have developed so that from the nineteenth century the Ukrainian linguists emerged from the Greek-Latin theory frame, revealed the peculiarities of the Ukrainian system in general and the accentual in particular, which also motivated the development of theoretical, terminological basis. In modern linguistic works researchers use nattive Ukrainian and borrowed terms: emphasis − accent, accentuation; to accent − to emphasize; accentuation − emphasis; stressed − accentual; accentuated − accented.

The present article is devoted to the linguistic status of the Greco-Latin components of the compound words such as “megaplanet, acrophobe, cardiology”, etc. In the linguistic literature there is no unanimous approach concerning their linguistic status. The authors analyzing numerous examples of compound words of Greek and Latin elements try to prove the difference between them and affixal morphemes by stressing on their role of word-forming stems in the structure of compound words and call them as structural-dependent stems. But at the same time from the semantic point of view they are considered as independent lexical language units, the property which makes communication possible among community members.

Teesid: Käesolev artikkel käsitleb uusklassikalist luulet ehk luulet, mis tärkab humanistliku hariduse pinnalt ja on loodud nn klassikalistes keeltes ehk vanakreeka ja ladina keeles. Artikli esimene pool toob välja paar üldist probleemi varauusaja poeetika käsitlemises nii Eestis kui mujal. Teises osas esitatakse alternatiivina mõned näited (autoriteks G. Krüger, H. Vogelmann, L. Luden, O. Hermelin ja H. Bartholin) Tartu ja Tallinna uusklassikalisest luulest värsstõlkes koos poeetika analüüsidega, avalikkusele tundmata luuletuste puhul esitatakse ka originaaltekstid. SUMMARYThis article discusses poetry in classical languages (Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin) belonging to the classical literary tradition while focusing on poetry from Tallinn and Tartu from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does not aim to present an overview of this tradition in Estonia (already an object of numerous studies), but rather to discuss some general problems connected to such studies—both in Europe and Estonia—and to show some alternative (or complementary) analyses of neo-classical poetics, together with verse translations and texts that are not easily available or are unknown to the scholars.The discussion of neo-classical poetry in Estonia finds problems in a detachment from poetics and the consequent discrepancies. Firstly, although scholarly treatises stress the value of casual poetry (forming the most eminent part of Estonian Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry), the same treatises present this poetry from the viewpoint of its social background, focusing more on the authors and events than the poetic form. For example, in the Anthology of Tartu casual poetry and the corpus of Neo-Latin poetry from Tartu, texts are presented according to genre, which is defined only according to the classification of social events (epithalamia, epicedia, congratulations for rectorate, disputations, etc). Secondly, in most cases (the anthology, re-editions), this poetry is presented to readers as prose translations. As in the case of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, the established norm in Estonia is verse translation. Translating poetry into prose, therefore, signals that these works are not to be considered poetry. Thirdly, commentaries on this poetry tend to list lexical parallels with authors from classical antiquity without distinguishing actual quotations from the usage of poetic formulae while simultaneously (mostly) ignoring the impact of pagan and Christian texts from late antiquity and renais­sance and humanist literature.One alternative is to present Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry as verse translations and focus more on discussing poetic devices and the impact of its contemporary poetry. Therefore, the second part of this article presents five poems as translations of verse and a subsequent analysis of their poetics.The first example is from a manuscript in the Tallinn City Archives and represents the earliest collection of neo-classical poetry, containing one Latin and five Greek poems belonging to the epistolary poem genre. Its author, Gregor Krüger Mesylanus (a latinized Greek translation of the name of his birth-town Mittenwalde, near Berlin), worked as a priest in Reval after his studies in Wittenberg during the time of Ph. Melanchthon (which explains Krüger‘s chosen poetic form). The Greek cycle is regarded thematically as variations on the same subject of the author‘s longing for home and his unhappiness with the jealousy and hostility of his fellow citizens in Reval. His choice of meter is influenced by Latin poetry, the initial long elegy balanced by four shorter poems of different meters (iambic and choriambic patterns). The final poem of the Greek cycle (Enviless Moon) is presented together with a metrical translation and analysis to demonstrate how sonorous patterns orchest­rate the thematic development of the poem: the author‘s wish to be like the moon, who receives its light from the brighter sun, but remains still happy and grateful to God for his own gift and ability to bring a smaller light to others.The second example analyzes the structure and poetic motives of a metrical translation of a Greek Pindaric Ode by Heinrich Vogelmann from 1633. The paper’s author also examines the European tradition of The second example analyzes the structure and poetic motives of a metrical translation of a Greek Pindaric Ode by Heinrich Vogelmann from 1633. The paper’s author also examines the European tradition of such odes (including more than sixty examples from 1548 until 2004). The third example discusses two alternative translations and additional translation possibilities of a recently discovered anagrammatic poem by Lorenz Luden. The fourth and fifth examples are congratulatory poems addressed to Andreas Borg for the publication of his disputation on civil liberty (in 1697). A Latin congratulatory poem by Olaus Hermelin is an example of politically engaged poetry, which addresses not the student but the subject of his disputation and contemporary political situation (the revolt of Estonian nobility against the Swedish king, who had recaptured donated lands, and the exile of its leader, Johann Reinhold Patkul). The Greek poem by H. Bartholin refers to the arts of Muses to demonstrate the changes in poetical representations of university studies: by the end of the seventeenth century the motives of the dancing and singing, flowery Muses is replaced with the stress of the toil in the stadium and the labyrinth of Muses.This article discusses poetry in classical languages (Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin) belonging to the classical literary tradition while focusing on poetry from Tallinn and Tartu from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does not aim to present an overview of this tradition in Estonia (already an object of numerous studies), but rather to discuss some general problems connected to such studies—both in Europe and Estonia—and to show some alternative (or complementary) analyses of neo-classical poetics, together with verse translations and texts that are not easily available or are unknown to the scholars.The discussion of neo-classical poetry in Estonia finds problems in a detachment from poetics and the consequent discrepancies. Firstly, although scholarly treatises stress the value of casual poetry (forming the most eminent part of Estonian Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry), the same treatises present this poetry from the viewpoint of its social background, focusing more on the authors and events than the poetic form. For example, in the Anthology of Tartu casual poetry and the corpus of Neo-Latin poetry from Tartu, texts are presented according to genre, which is defined only according to the classification of social events (epithalamia, epicedia, congratulations for rectorate, disputations, etc). Secondly, in most cases (the anthology, re-editions), this poetry is presented to readers as prose translations. As in the case of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, the established norm in Estonia is verse translation. Translating poetry into prose, therefore, signals that these works are not to be considered poetry. Thirdly, commentaries on this poetry tend to list lexical parallels with authors from classical antiquity without distinguishing actual quotations from the usage of poetic formulae while simultaneously (mostly) ignoring the impact of pagan and Christian texts from late antiquity and renais­sance and humanist literature. One alternative is to present Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry as verse translations and focus more on discussing poetic devices and the impact of its contemporary poetry. Therefore, the second part of this article presents five poems as translations of verse and a subsequent analysis of their poetics. The first example is from a manuscript in the Tallinn City Archives and represents the earliest collection of neo-classical poetry, containing one Latin and five Greek poems belonging to the epistolary poem genre. Its author, Gregor Krüger Mesylanus (a latinized Greek translation of the name of his birth-town Mittenwalde, near Berlin), worked as a priest in Reval after his studies in Wittenberg during the time of Ph. Melanchthon (which explains Krüger‘s chosen poetic form). The Greek cycle is regarded thematically as variations on the same subject of the author‘s longing for home and his unhappiness with the jealousy and hostility of his fellow citizens in Reval. His choice of meter is influenced by Latin poetry, the initial long elegy balanced by four shorter poems of different meters (iambic and choriambic patterns). The final poem of the Greek cycle (Enviless Moon) is presented together with a metrical translation and analysis to demonstrate how sonorous patterns orchest­rate the thematic development of the poem: the author‘s wish to be like the moon, who receives its light from the brighter sun, but remains still happy and grateful to God for his own gift and ability to bring a smaller light to others. The second example analyzes the structure and poetic motives of a metrical translation of a Greek Pindaric Ode by Heinrich Vogelmann from 1633. The paper’s author also examines the European tradition of This article discusses poetry in classical languages (Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin) belonging to the classical literary tradition while focusing on poetry from Tallinn and Tartu from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does not aim to present an overview of this tradition in Estonia (already an object of numerous studies), but rather to discuss some general problems connected to such studies—both in Europe and Estonia—and to show some alternative (or complementary) analyses of neo-classical poetics, together with verse translations and texts that are not easily available or are unknown to the scholars.The discussion of neo-classical poetry in Estonia finds problems in a detachment from poetics and the consequent discrepancies. Firstly, although scholarly treatises stress the value of casual poetry (forming the most eminent part of Estonian Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry), the same treatises present this poetry from the viewpoint of its social background, focusing more on the authors and events than the poetic form. For example, in the Anthology of Tartu casual poetry and the corpus of Neo-Latin poetry from Tartu, texts are presented according to genre, which is defined only according to the classification of social events (epithalamia, epicedia, congratulations for rectorate, disputations, etc). Secondly, in most cases (the anthology, re-editions), this poetry is presented to readers as prose translations. As in the case of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, the established norm in Estonia is verse translation. Translating poetry into prose, therefore, signals that these works are not to be considered poetry. Thirdly, commentaries on this poetry tend to list lexical parallels with authors from classical antiquity without distinguishing actual quotations from the usage of poetic formulae while simultaneously (mostly) ignoring the impact of pagan and Christian texts from late antiquity and renaissance and humanist literature.One alternative is to present Neo-Latin and Humanist Greek poetry as verse translations and focus more on discussing poetic devices and the impact of its contemporary poetry. Therefore, the second part of this article presents five poems as translations of verse and a subsequent analysis of their poetics.The first example is from a manuscript in the Tallinn City Archives and represents the earliest collection of neo-classical poetry, containing one Latin and five Greek poems belonging to the epistolary poem genre. Its author, Gregor Krüger Mesylanus (a latinized Greek translation of the name of his birth-town Mittenwalde, near Berlin), worked as a priest in Reval after his studies in Wittenberg during the time of Ph. Melanchthon (which explains Krüger‘s chosen poetic form). The Greek cycle is regarded thematically as variations on the same subject of the author‘s longing for home and his unhappiness with the jealousy and hostility of his fellow citizens in Reval. His choice of meter is influenced by Latin poetry, the initial long elegy balanced by four shorter poems of different meters (iambic and choriambic patterns). The final poem of the Greek cycle (Enviless Moon) is presented together with a metrical translation and analysis to demonstrate how sonorous patterns orchestrate the thematic development of the poem: the author‘s wish to be like the moon, who receives its light from the brighter sun, but remains still happy and grateful to God for his own gift and ability to bring a smaller light to others.The second example analyzes the structure and poetic motives of a metrical translation of a Greek Pindaric Ode by Heinrich Vogelmann from 1633. The paper’s author also examines the European tradition of

NB: Artiklen er på dansk, resuméet på engelsk. Erik Petersen: Wulfstan’s Codex and Schumacher’s List. On the Oldest Record of Manuscripts in the Royal Library. It has hitherto been assumed that the earliest list of manuscripts in the Royal Library is the section of manuscripts in the catalogue preserved in the library’s archive as E 8: Catalogus librorum typis exaratorum, pariter ac Manuscriptorum, quibus, curante Petro Schu­machero, aucta est Regia Bibliotheca. A total of 82 manuscripts are recorded at the end (f. 17v-20r) of the Catalogus E 8, which was made by Willum Worm who signed and dated it on the 4th of January 1671at his accession as librarian to the Danish king, Christian V. Worm succeeded Peter Schumacher, perhaps better known as Griffenfeld, who act­ed as librarian to king Frederik III from 1663 to 1670 and to Christian V until Worm took over. The Catalogus E 8 has been known for long as ‘Schumacher’s catalogue’. Thus Ellen Jørgensen, the author of the Catalogus codicum Latinorum medii ævi Bib­liothecæ Regiæ Hafniensis (1926), referred to it as cat. Schumacheri, and stated, on its authority, that a given manuscript found in the Catalogus E 8 had been acquired by the library between 1663 and 1670. Others followed her example. The manuscript section of Catalogus E 8 was published by Harald Ilsøe in 1999 in his book on the history of the Royal Library’s holdings until ca. 1780 (Det kongelige Bibliotek i støbeskeen. Studier og samlinger til bestandens historie indtil ca. 1780, 1999, p. 574-581). However, the Catalogus E 8 is not the catalogue of Schumacher. It is the catalogue of Willum Worm. And the catalogue of Worm does not cover the entire period 1663 to the end of 1670, but only the latter part of it, i.e. the period from the beginning of 1666 to the end of 1670. In fact, Peter Schumacher made his own list, which has never received the atten­tion it deserves – if at all noticed, its contents have been misinterpreted. It is pre­served in the RL Archive as E 8 a. Schumacher’s list is neither dated nor signed. It contains records for more than a hundred printed books. It also contains a list of 45 manuscripts, several of which have dedications to king Frederik III. An analysis of the years of publication of the printed books and of the dedications in the manuscripts makes it possible to date Schumacher’s list in E 8 a to the end of 1665. The 45 manu­scripts thus represent the nucleus of the manuscript collection of the king’s growing library. Apparently it is exactly the aim and ambition of creating such a collection that Schumacher’s list reflects. It is important also because Worm’s list of 1671does not repeat entries of manuscripts on Schumacher’s list; in other words, the two lists of manuscripts supplement each other. Most of the manuscripts recorded on the list were contemporary, and many of them directly related to the king either by contents or by dedications by authors or donators. Whereas the printed books reflect an able awareness of what was going on in the intellectual centres of Europe, the manuscripts reveal a more limited horizon. Not a single manuscript on Schumacher’s list seems to have been acquired by pur­chase, neither on the European market nor in Denmark. There are, however, manuscripts of great importance on Schumacher’s list, amongst them the following medieval manuscripts (with my identifications of their present call numbers in the Old Royal Collection, Gammel Kongelig Samling or GKS): 4 Den Islandske Lovbog udgiffvet aff Kong Magnus Haagensøn. fol. = GKS 1154 2° 26 Descriptio Eccles. Romanæ cum omnibus suis ceremoniis, ritibus etc. Sic inci­pit: Apollogus de ordine Romano. MS. Pergam. = GKS 1595 4° 29 Liber Daticus Ecclesiæ et Capituli Lundensis. fol. in membran. = GKS 845 2° 36 Thaumbachius de Consolatione Theologiæ chartâ pergamenâ. = GKS 1370 4° 39 Biblia Lat. MSS. in 8°. anno 1237. = GKS 3375 8° Items 4 and 29 were produced in medieval Denmark. Items 36 and 39 were both very common in the late Middle Ages; none of them are ‘royal’ in any sense of the word, and may well have been found among the remnants of the old church somewhere in Denmark. The same is true of the most remarkable item on the list, the Descriptio Ecclesesiæ Romanæ cum omnibus suis ceremoniis, ritibus etc. with the incipit: Apollogus de ordine Romano, the famous codex of Wulfstan, produced just after the turn of the first millennium under the supervision of Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester and arch­bishop of York, and containing his autograph notes in Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Next to nothing has been known about its history in Denmark until now. It has, in fact, only been possible to state that it was in The Royal Library in 1786, when the Old Royal Collection was established. Due to Schumacher’s list we now know that it was in the king’s library already in 1665, and that it is likely to have been in Denmark long before then. As to the protestant king’s interest in a medieval book of the old church such as Wulfstan’s, a glimpse on the medieval manuscripts recorded in Worms’ Catalogus E 8 may be enlightening. The focus of collecting did not change or changed very little. Nos. 37, 47, 73, 78, 79, 80 are described as lawbooks, written in Danish or Old Norse. A few may be medieval, but they are not described in sufficient detail to be identified. The provenance of a single manuscript in Greek is unknown. The follow­ing are all in Latin: 2 Fundation paae biskop Byrges Capel i Lund 1518. = GKS 846 2° 11Evangelistæ in Membranâ. Probably = GKS 1347 4° (Ilsøe: GKS 12 2°, lost) 40 Justinus in Membranâ. = GKS 451 2° or GKS 452 2° (Ilsøe’s suggestions) 57 Bibliorum tomus II incipit a Iobo. = GKS 1310 4° 77 Notkirkes alterbog i gammel dage. = GKS 3453 8° Item 2 was produced in Lund, that is in medieval Denmark. Item 57 was produced in Italy, but belonged to the chapter of the cathedral of Lund in the later Middle Ages. If my identification is correct, item 11was produced in England, but it had migrated to Bergen in Norway in the Middle Ages. I am in doubt about the identity of item 40, but Iustinus was widely copied and read in the Middle Ages, even in Denmark. Item 77 is of particular interest in our context. It is a Latin manuale ecclesiasticum, and was found in the local church of Notmark on the island of Als in 1669 by king Frederik III himself. He visited the provincial church and required to take ‘the old monastic book in Latin’ as well as a copy in German of king Valdemar’s law book along to Copenhagen. His request was granted and the visit of the king recorded by the vicar in a Danish printed bible that remained in the church. The medieval books in the collection were not bought abroad because of their splen­dour or prestige, but inherited, received as gifts or gathered from places inside the king’s own realms. Thus the catalogues E 8 a and E 8 not only offer evidence of the presence of a given manuscript in the kings Library ante the end of 1665 or ante 1671. They also indicate that the manuscripts may well have had a much longer history in Denmark than hitherto known. Thus the list of Schumacher is not just a detail in the history of a library. It is also the mirror through which Wulfstan and his codex may become visible in the distant landscape of medieval Denmark.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

By surveying the history of Christian theology of the Trinity and Incarnation from Origen of Alexandria to William of Ockham, this chapter shows that Boethius’s addition of rationality to the definition of persona is a significant moment in the history of personhood. Among Greek and Syriac philosophical theologians, rationality was not included in theorizing about what made each divine individual or hypostasis (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) distinct from the others. The evidence surveyed suggests that rationality is included in the definition of a persona only in Latin authors after Boethius. Nevertheless, rationality did no substantive work in Boethius’s or later Latin authors’ theorizing about the Trinity or Incarnation with regard to personhood. Richard of St. Victor replaced Boethius’s “individual substance” with “incommunicable existence” in order to give a fully general definition of persona. This change was widely accepted by later philosophers (e.g., John Locke) and theologians.

In this chapter authors have discussed the role of plants to develop contaminant free environment. This concept is also known as Phytoremediation. Phytoremediation is a word formed from the Greek prefix “phyto” meaning plant, and the Latin suffix “remedium” meaning to clean or restore. This technology has been receiving attention lately as an innovative, cost-effective alternative to the more established treatment methods used at hazardous waste sites. Phytoremediation can be classified into different applications, such as phytofiltration or rhizofiltration, phytostabilization, phytovolatilization, phytodegradation and phyto-extraction etc. The chapter will deal with phytoremediation, its advantages, limitations and in detail techniques of classification and application.